10 More Horror Movies Way Darker Than Advertised

Adapted almost verbatim from Ira Levin’s novel, Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby puts his once-frequent collaborator Mia Farrow front and centre as Rosemary Woodhouse, a young woman who has moved into a new Manhattan apartment and begins experiencing strange things around her neighbours, the Castevets.

The film has a kind of warm nostalgia to it, and differs greatly from modern horror movies by being set within an ordinary apartment block, populated by ordinary, middle-class people; with no action sequences, no chases, no rapid editing or jump scares every five minutes. Instead Polanski builds up Rosemary’s descent into what appears like hysteria with a mounting dread, leaving her - and us – stranded on a knife’s edge, not knowing whether the apartment block is populated by sinister cultists or just well-meaning oddballs.

And yet the film is far darker than anyone remembers, or indeed anyone was prepared for at the time. Rosemary is kept in a state of fear and minor sedation, gaslighted, abused and, in one scene, literally drugged and raped by the devil. When Rosemary comes to term, believing it to be her own human child, her husband (now a paid-up cult member) and the Castevets tell her it was stillborn and secrete the devil baby away. And what’s worse, she ends up succumbing to the cult in the end, accepting baby Adrian for her own.